It’s not about the shopping, folks: A girl sits in a shopping cart at Toys R Us.AP

A blessed Thanksgiving!

I praise God for the radiant virtue so evident in our community since the wreckage of the hurricane. You will pardon me, I hope, and I trust that you’ll understand, if I say that I am especially proud of our Catholic family’s generous outreach, although I rejoice in the ecumenical extent of the area’s compassion.

While Thursday will find many of our neighbors still without homes and provisions, I trust they can at least whisper a prayer of praise for the essentials of life that no wind or wave can wipe out — love, faith, hope, life itself, family, friends, a future and a community that has let them know they are not alone.

Let me glorify God as well for the gift of our country. No matter if your issues, party or candidates won or lost two weeks ago: How singularly blessed we are as citizens of a country that is governed from, by and for the people. Almost weekly do we read or hear of nations where elections — if they even have them — are occasions of mobs, armies, violence, tear gas and near-anarchy. Not here . . . thank God!

But my prayer this Thursday will be not first one of praise, but of petition. I will ask the Lord to keep us a culture where personal friendship, genuine conversation and family unity can be a high priority. I’ll beg God to keep those values constant in our society.

Why? Because I’m fearful they’re disappearing.

Experts in behavioral sciences and sociology seem to share my apprehension. These scholars write that personal contact — verbal, face-to-face quality conversation and healthy leisure where we simply “spend time” as family or friends — is going the way of the rotary telephone. Now we prefer to text, e-mail, Facebook or Twitter — with a personal phone call or letter even becoming quaint, and quality time in each other’s company rare.

And now the days that a classic, civil culture sets aside for such lofty projects as visiting, conversing or sharing a meal together — such as the weekly Sabbath and holidays such as Thanksgiving — are in jeopardy.

The stores, we hear, will open on Thanksgiving. Isn’t that a sign of progress and liberation? Sorry, but no — it’s a sign of a further descent into a highly privatized, impersonal, keep-people-at-a-distance culture, one that values having stuff and doing things over just being with people whom we love, cherish and appreciate.

While a student in Europe, I once spent New Year’s Eve in Holland with two other classmates. We stayed at a simple pensión run by a cheerful elderly couple, and our rate included breakfast and supper. That morning, the owners explained that New Year’s Eve was for the Dutch a solemn, quiet evening with family and friends.

Thus, they explained, the meal in the hotel dining room would not be available, and, they warned, nothing — no restaurant, bar or store — nothing in the city would be open. “This evening is for us,” they said, “like we understand Thanksgiving is for you. Everybody is with family or friends.”

Just as the three of us were about to conclude that we’d have a lonely, boring, hungry evening ahead of us, the couple exclaimed, “So, tonight, you are not customers. You are family. You join us, our children, grandchildren and close friends for supper.”

The three of us were near tears. And that evening of conversation, good food, song and even prayer before the meal was ever-memorable.

The lesson was clear: For the Dutch culture, time with family and friends was the highest priority.

That was 37 years ago. I wonder if the stores are now open in Holland on New Year’s Eve? Because, now, sadly, that’s what Thanksgiving is becoming here in America.